Methods of advertising are well known in the art. Commercials are played between television or radio programs; newspapers, magazines, and other publications include printed advertisements; flyers or coupons are mailed directly to consumers' homes; popup and banner ads are present on the internet, and so on.
The revenue for this advertising is often derived from how many people receive or view an advertisement or advertising campaign. For example, television advertising costs are based on the popularity of the event during which the advertisements are run, i.e., advertisements run during the Super Bowl are more expensive than advertisements run during the local news. Revenue from direct mail advertising campaigns or published print ads are based on the number of mailings or issues of the printed publication sold, and on the number of coupons contained in these mailings which are redeemed by consumers. Internet advertising revenue may be established from the number of clicks on a link, popup, or banner ad, by the number of visitors to a website displaying a certain ad, or by “click-through” methodology.
Heretofore, however, none of these advertising campaign or tracking techniques is particularly well suited for hyper-local domains, e.g., shopping malls, airports, amusement parks, and as further defined infra. Hyper-local domains must resort to online campaign techniques or pre-printed static material for marketing. However, online campaigns are often overly broad, because websites are available to any user on the internet, but the ad is only applicable to a smaller subset of users who are in geographic proximity to the hyper-local domain. For this reason, an advertiser in a hyper-local domain may be forced to pay for a very large number of users to view or click an internet advertisement, when only a small fraction of these users is capable of actually visiting the hyper-local domain. Accordingly, it is difficult to track the effectiveness of such an internet advertising campaign because the number of clicks or views may be disproportionally high in comparison to the number of users who are being targeted (i.e., those consumers geographically located near the hyper-local domain). Printed ads can be limited to a geographic location, but depend on non-personalized pre-printed material, and the advertiser must incur significant postal charges in order to distribute the advertisements.
Generally, there is a lack of capability to conduct on-demand print marketing or advertising campaigns in hyper-local domains, an inability to take on-site advantage of prospective customers who are already in a hyper-local domain, an inability to include semi-structured advertisements and messages (e.g., bulletin boards, small classifieds, handwritten messages, photo scans, garage sales) in hyper-local domains, and an inability to track non-standard statistics such as presence, inquiries, visits, etc., in a cost-efficient way. Also, real world shopping often involves lists of things to do and a sequence of places to visit and traveling includes stopping at sequence of points along a route, but current marketing techniques fail to add value by personally advertising to a consumer along the consumer's particular route.